Barnegat Bay's fate unclear

Massive debris and sand displacement roughed up Ocean County's signature waterway that was in environmental distress even before the superstorm hit

Dec. 9, 2012

A boat named Marlyn IV from Chadwick Island washed up on the mainland in a swampy area of the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Brick. Brick Mayor Stephen Acropolis looks it over. / Bob Bielk/ Asbury Park Press Staff Photographer

Written by

Kristi Funderburk

@kfunder

Vast amounts of debris from superstorm Sandy washed up on the mainland next to the bay in the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Brick. Brick Mayor Stephen Acropolis looks out over the waste field off St. Lawrence Boulevard. / BOB BIELK/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Barnegat Bay impacts after the storm

Experts say it will take time to assess Sandy’s full impact, but some problems are apparent: • Derelict boats: Hundreds are missing from docks and boat yards. State Police and Coast Guard are working to secure boats and remove fuel when possible. • Trash and sediment blocking channels and lagoons: Municipal officials say lagoons need an organized cleanup so they can be ready for the 2013 boating season. • New depths and shallows in the bay: State Police report they are finding dramatic changes in the bay’s bottom contours, where new sandbars have occurred and old channels are blocked. • Sand and sediment pushed by the storm surge may have covered eelgrass and shellfish beds. But it’s also possible the storm may have swept out “sour” bottom where mud high in sulfides was less hospitable to marine life.

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BRICK — Children’s toys and pieces of furniture are strewn across marshland thousands of feet from the closest body of water.

Broken lumber and lost shoes float along channels more familiar to recreational boaters.

All the trash thrust into Barnegat Bay and left along the wetlands that frame it is physical evidence that superstorm Sandy left her mark on the already troubled estuary, but it could take several months to determine how Sandy impacted the bay.

“When you look at this and look at how much garbage is out here, you think, ‘who’s going to clean this up?’ ” said Mayor Stephen Acropolis, who has witnessed the watersheds and streets of Brick become small landfills.

The storm’s first impact on the bay happened in the days after it came ashore.

There was a short-term risk of bacteria and viruses in the water, a typical effect after any rainstorm because of waste-water runoff, and there is a lot of debris, some submerged, in the water, said Michael Kennish, a research professor for the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.

“It was so intense and there was so much movement of water, not just precipitation, but also the storm surge that would go into the waterways carrying pathogens,” he said. “If there was any positive, it’s that it occurred when it did. No one was swimming.”

The state Department of Environmental Protection acted quickly with a ban on recreational boating and shellfish harvesting, Kennish said.

The state agency still is monitoring the bay and all its coastal waters in the aftermath of Sandy, said Larry Hajna, spokesman for the state agency.

Its workers are facing loads of debris, lost boats and numerous small leaks from vehicles, vessels and heating oil tanks in the state’s coastal waterways, but just how much isn’t yet clear, Hajna said. Measuring Sandy’s impact to the bay and any potential restoration costs could take months, he said.

“We have to assess where the debris is, the extent it is, and how do you address it. For example, how do you address a house that’s 10 feet in the water?” Hajna said. “We’re looking at new sorts of challenges.”

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Unexpected rejuvenation?

Gef Flimlin, who runs the Barnegat Bay Shellfish Restoration Program, has a gut feeling the bay won’t be as bad as it may now seem.

The power of the surge turned over the bottom substrate in the bay, churning up what has been growing in typically still waters, said Flimlin, a marine agent and longtime shellfish specialist with the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Service of Ocean County.

“It kind of rejuvenates the bottom,” he said. “It’s like you want your lawn to grow, so you don’t leave your leaves on the lawn. You rake the leaves up, you get rid of them. Well, that’s what happened with the storm.”

Flimlin thinks what happens to the bay over the next five to 10 years will be interesting to follow.

There is a lot of work to do in the meantime.

There are a couple of hundred boats reported on marshes and shorelines in the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge that covers 47,000 acres along the bay, said Stan Hales, executive director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership.

Those boats pose a continuing hazard of fuel leaks and fires, he said.

Much of the fuel threatening the bay dissipated or evaporated in the days after the storm and the Coast Guard has been removing fuel tanks from boats in the bay to prevent more leaks, Hajna said.

Brick resident Walter Durrua, 77, helped the cleanup effort along by ridding the floating debris from part of the Metedeconk River behind his mother’s house in the township.

“The sad thing is, it was people’s lives in there,” he said.

Durrua is concerned about all the trash Sandy left, calling the steep pile built on a Route 70 parking lot Brick’s “Mount Trashmore.”

All the debris would be considered litter if it was on the beaches and is just an added pollutant to the bay and threat to wildlife, Kennish said.

The amount of sand and how it altered bay habitats is another issue that must be examined, Kennish said. The shallow bay is even less deep in some areas, a change that impacts boaters and the bay’s ecology, he said.

One ecological concern Hales raised in the aftermath of Sandy is the fate of eelgrass beds. The best of the underwater meadows, critical habitats for marine life, may be buried or swept away, he said.

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How the shellfish beds, shallows and saltmarsh creeks, important as nurseries for summer flounder and other economically valuable fish, fared is also unknown at this point, Hales said.

Before Sandy struck, there were suggestions that Barnegat Bay’s nutrient pollution problems could be addressed with an artificial link to the ocean, such as an underground flume. Sandy did it by opening an inlet at Mantoloking.

“A lot of people asked if we could leave that as a natural experiment for a couple of years,” Hales said. But the inlet cut off hundreds of surviving homes and “it essentially made the Mantoloking bridge impassable,” he said.

Another inlet is just one topic of discussion that’s needed after Sandy, said William deCamp Jr., president of Save Barnegat Bay.

“Global warming is going to have to be taken seriously so our children and grandchildren don’t have to go through one of these,” said deCamp, who saw his town of Mantoloking flattened under Sandy’s power.

DeCamp’s home fared rather well, thanks in large part to the trees on his home’s eastern side taking a brunt of the hit. That’s part of why he believes planners should discuss the role plants play in protection.

“This is a shock to many of us as big as 9/11 and I think the public is in the mood for solving problems by pulling together,” he said.